The History of the Church is a vital part of the Orthodox Christian faith. Orthodox Christians are defined significantly by their continuity with all those who have gone before, those who first received and preached the truth of Jesus Christ to the world, those who helped to formulate the expression and worship of our faith, and those who continue to move forward in the unchanging yet ever-dynamic Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church.

70 Apostle Mark writes Gospel; Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed by the Romans; expulsion of the Christians from the synagogues; Rabbi Johanan ben Zacchai founds college at Jamnia that becomes seat of Sanhedrin and center of Judaism A.D. 70-135, enabling emergence of Rabbinic Judaism; beginning of Jewish diaspora; by this time the work of the Apostle Paul has planted the faith on firm foundation in the major cities of the Roman empire.

90 Council of Jamnia (Javneh) marks final separation and distinction between the Jewish and Christian communities, including rejection of the Septuagint widely then in use among the Hellenized Jewish diaspora; Jewish canon of Scripture closed; in the Eighteen Benedictions, Judaism's central prayer, a sentence is included in the Twelfth Benediction cursing the "Nazarenes", but it was no longer recited after the definite separation of Christians from the synagogue in the next century.

Notes

Some of these dates are necessarily a bit vague, as records for some periods are particularly difficult to piece together accurately.

The division of Church History into separate eras as done here will always be to some extent arbitrary, though it was attempted to group periods according to major watershed events.

This timeline is necessarily biased toward the history of the Orthodox Church, though a number of non-Orthodox or purely political events are mentioned for their importance in history related to Orthodoxy or for reference.